The Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans

American speech is remarkably straightforward. They tell it as it is. Linguistic subtlety, innuendo, and irony that other nations find delightful puzzle the Americans, who take most statements at face value, weigh them for accuracy, and reject anything they don’t understand.

There have been four elections in which a presidential candidate won the popular (national) vote, yet lost the Electoral College vote.

The United States’ election system was created in large part because of the problem of slaves, who were considered to be residents of their states but were not permitted to vote. The Southern planters owned more than 500,000 slaves and wanted them to be counted as population for the purpose of representation in Congress. The northern states objected on the grounds that slaves were not free citizens but chattel. As a compromise, each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, which gave the southern states greater representation than they otherwise warranted.